Farewell
by Oceanbreeze7
Summary: Post Doomsday: He always came back, it didn't matter when or with whom, he always came back. Or at least, as close as one could get, to the dead.


Every year.

Every single year in late November, on the fourteenth. Just when the leaves were turning red and shed from the large trees and fell to the ground in a fresh little storm. Just when the men went out to harvest ripened apples, or when the children started to bundle up for the approaching winter.

Every year, a man came.

Dressed in the exact same garb from the years before, always someone by his side. A woman, a man, sometimes none at all. But he was always there.

The exact same date for twenty years.

Just as dusk was settling out, and the streetlamps set ablaze, they walked. Silently and almost ghostly they moved past the old black gates- locking it was of no use. The Gravekeeper had tried that long ago, no matter the lock or how hard he tied it shut, the gate always slid open.

4:29 PM, at 4:25 the sun vanished below the distant clouds and trees, now, an eerie fog drifted above the ground, causing the markers to appear even more saddening.

A dark skinned woman walked beside him this time, frowning at the silence. No birds or squirrels, as if nature herself mourned the one they came to visit. Perhaps they too bowed their heads to offer silence, or were they too scared to utter a word?

He held flowers, large yellow roses, rather beautiful as they shone through the dusk.

He stopped walking as he came to a large marker, a stone cube with hundreds of names artfully carved into the fine granite. And very gently, the dark skinned woman reached up to trace a name, and tears shone in her eyes. As if she knew someone who had her name carved into the stone.

The man- he had already vanished. Moving to the back corner where the Gravekeeper knew nothing was. Days after days he had traveled back, trying to find out what the man had always visited, but nothing was there.

His flowers were gone also.

So they left, and the dark skinned woman uttered a small word which the Grave Keeper heard over the painful silence and his own breath.

_'Cousin'_ Ah, a dead relative. But that was the girl, what was of the man?

And the year after, he came again, alone, and this time, carrying nineteen soft cream roses. And he slid into the cemetery, over the grounds carefully, as if his converse clad feet never touched the ground, and his haunted brown eyes had the area mapped out in his mind.

He vanished once more with a swirl of his trench coat, and the Gravekeeper cursed in his mind, marking off another year that he had missed it, whatever it was.

The next year, he was ready. Waiting and watching, and the man was there once more. His face the same except for a few lines around his eyes, that were anything but laugh lines. A red head was by his arm, shivering and looking around with a frown; eyes glistening sadly as she gently ran her fingers along the smooth stone.

And the Gravekeeper approached, wanting to hear what they had to say.

"-re we here?" She asked voice barely above a whisper as she waved a small lantern around cleaning the dirt from old Maribel Dawnhart's grave. Cleaning her name and brushing the stone clean.

"…paying respects." The man said. And the Gravekeeper gasped slightly.

The voice, so haunted, and so saddened. One that had lost all, and gained little. It was the voice of a loner, of the wind itself as it cried out in a storm.

"…The battle of Canary Wharf. The battle that went on when you were in Spain." The man nodded towards the large granite chunk which had caused so many to wait and watch as he vanished into the mist.

This time, he had nineteen deep crimson flowers. Always nineteen, since he started coming, it was nineteen.

And they were gone; the small sound of sobbing brought his attention to the girl who was gently led out by the man, who seemed as if he had no more tears left in his eyes.

The man never came the next year. Or the next.

The Gravekeeper watched, and waited as his hair grew grey and his skin thickened like old leather. Once more, the leaves fell to the ground, and the Gravekeeper took a shovel to chip away at the thick frost which hung to the memorial like claws.

"Late to be out, isn't it?" The man gasped, spinning around when he heard another accent, Scottish. A man was on her arm, looking at him with a frown and looking around and shivering slightly as his breath turned to mist and vanished in the air.

And the Gravekeeper turned to the man, a new man.

Floppy hair and green eyes. A chiseled chin and small ears, but there was something familiar in the bow tie and tweed jacket that was so much like the Gravekeeper's own.

"…You're late." The Gravekeeper nodded, looking over in the corner, and setting the shovel onto the ground with a wince. He was growing old, much to old.

"I'm surprised you recognized me." The man nodded, the exact same man from a long time ago. From when he had a trench coat and the brown eyes.

But no matter which color, the depth could never be hidden.

"Doctor, who is this?" The other man asked, the one behind the woman, and he eyes the Gravekeeper warily as he let out a wheezy chuckle. The old man- the Doctor exhaled and blinked slowly, slipping his hands into his pockets.

"An old friend, a stranger, and nobody at all." The Doctor nodded and the Gravekeeper exchanged a small smile, knowing that was how he viewed the man in front of him.

"…Come along, I want to show you something." The Doctor finally said, after a few moments of hesitation. And he walked, feet crunching on a few leaves that dried early this year, and looking up through the shadows casted from the flickering lampposts that offered little to no light at all.

And the Gravekeeper watched, as from nothing, his eyes betrayed him, to show a monument, a statue of a beautiful wolf, tall and proud, with a strange silver metal trailing upwards like a fine reaching tendril of energy.

"Doctor! It's beautiful!" The girl gushed, about to run forward to see it more closely, that is, until she saw what was carved into the rock the wolf had it's front left paw resting on.

_'In memory of Rose Tyler,_

_'The savior of Earth, and the Savior of so much more.'_

The girl and man were frozen, looking at the monument with something keen to horror and sadness, the overwhelming greif that almost overcame them.

"…Who was she?" The girl finally asked, gaining the attention of the Gravekeeper as well, wishing he could know the answer also.

"…She was Rose Tyler, the greatest human I have ever met." He smiled, trailing his fingers across the wolf's kind and watching muzzle, whipping away imaginary tears from it's eye.

"You loved her." The man accused, looking at the statue with a small frown.

And the man reached into his jacket, pulling out nineteen roses, this time, they were different.

A mix of beautiful gold and silver, seeming almost alive the way they sparkled in the faint light there was.

And he set them by the feet of the wolf, muttering something in a beautiful language the Gravekeeper did not recognize. Old Greek? Latin?

"The curse of me, watching things grow old and die. Watching the ones I've come to love fall down and rot in the Earth." The new man bitterly stated, bowing his head and saying nothing.

They left soon after, the three of them. The Gravekeeper went online, searching for Rose Tyler.

She went missing long ago, missing, not dead. A body was never found, but it had been too long, too long for hope to still have survived.

Nineteen years old, that was what the flowers always stood for, and the colors, the colors that came to mind seeing her picture on the web.

So he laughed with his victory, and wheezed his success, for he had finally figured out what the great mystery was.

So he laid down one night, in the calm of winter, and closed his eyes and let his old weak heart stop, smiling as he drifted away, up into the black sky filled with stars.

And the Doctor watched, looking down at the grave from the Tardis, watching the monitor as the man passed away, just as all things human did.

_'You can spend your entire life with me, Rose Tyler. But I can't spend mine with you.'_


End file.
